CYLS - 2

CYLS

2
Deadvox; 2015

4.3 out of 5 - TOP ALBUM

By J Simpson

For the longest time, electronic music required a strictly linear approach, which did not lend itself well to improvisation or collaboration. Hand drawn beats and tirelessly sequenced synths were more like building a ship in a bottle than the heat and inspiration that can come from two spirits communing.

More and more people are incorporating electronics into live setups, yielding interesting new hybrids that give us hope that maybe the future is out there for us. Thank God.

Ten years ago, if you would have told me a record fused dark ambiance, atonal industrial scrapes, bits of ritual temple music and late night noir jazz, I may have thrown up on your Converses. Those words, strung together, make it sound like Skinny Puppy with a house beat and some lame-ass trumpet loops overtop.

That couldn't be further from the truth with the masterful drift of 2, from the enigmatic CYLS. Rather than being some generic genre-fudging to shift units, 2 is a deep space drift to a temple cave in the center of the cosmos. Ritualistic table beats meet flickering hisses, like TV static on the walls of a Ridley Scott space station.

This is one of the first times I've ever heard jazz elements, the trumpet on "Alive," that has not totally derailed an electronic record. This is doom jazz dark ambient of the highest order with truly excellent martial beats that kick like a cannon, shredding your sternum in the most pleasant of ways.

There is a sense of timelessness and floating that permeates 2. It sounds like what maybe it felt like for Wolverine, floating in an amniotic vat, while having an adamantium skeleton shoved down his throat. Beneath the tranquility, track names like "Murder" and "War" make us wonder what the hell is going on, what brought this on? Is this the endless night, post-nuclear war? The ancestral memories of our dead race? CYLS aren't coughing up any easy answers. You're going to have to listen, and have your own visions.

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